December 2008 posts

Friday, December 19, 2008

NPR.org,December 15, 2008 ·
Let's say that the history of correspondence as literature began with
Cicero, proceeded to the mash notes of Abelard and Heloise, and took on
new dimensions with such epistolary novels as Pamela, Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Dracula. High points of recent decades include the The Groucho Letters (where Mr. Marx waggles a virtual cigar at the likes of T.S. Eliot and Harry S. Truman) and last year's Letters of Noel Coward, which went to print bearing two letters faked by a charismatic felon whose memoir appears on this list.

Dear
reader, sitting down with a collection of letters — or a vivid
reflection on them — affords a singularly intimate encounter with a
writer, so please give a look to these exercises in mail bonding....The Printable ListComplete Holiday Book Recommendations 2008

Home From HavanaDigitizing Papa Hem’s Cuba papers is all well and good. Still, it isn’t the same thing as being there.
(Photo source)

Here I am, sitting in my cozy office in Princeton, looking out at perfectly filthy New Jersey weather — freezing rain and sleet. It is doubtless around 80 degrees in Havana, with clear skies and a brisk wind. Ah well! I was able to enjoy the weather, the food, and the company of good friends and colleagues there for the past four days....The Bush administration steadily tightened restrictions on travel from
the United States to Cuba, both for Cuban-Americans planning family
visits, and for those of us with “approved” reasons to travel to the
island. One such Bush change was the requirement that undergraduate
students only go to Cuba if they are enrolled for at least 10 weeks in
a Cuban university, thus eliminating the short student study trips that
Princeton and many other American institutions organized as recently as
five years ago. Nevertheless, several American colleges and
universities currently have groups of undergrads enrolled at the
Universidad de La Habana — Sarah Lawrence, Brown, Harvard, North
Carolina, Presbyterian among them. We are hoping to have a Woodrow
Wilson School junior seminar on some aspect of Cuban public policy
during the spring term, 2010, and we found a warm reception for that
proposal at the University on Tuesday. We actually found greater
difficulty in securing suitable housing for our students, and we are
still working on that problem....

From the article comments/notes: "On January 21 President Obama can use his authority to provide general (no need to apply) licenses for twelve categories of non-tourist travel including family (Cuban American), educational, humanitarian, religious, sports, culture, and 'support for the Cuban people'." Urge he do so at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/obamacuba/

RICHARD YATES’S 1961 novel, “Revolutionary Road,” is far from the kind of property that typically becomes a big Hollywood movie, especially one starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in their first post-“Titanic”
outing together. For one thing, the book is set back in the mid-20th
century — an era that, until “Mad Men” came along to exhume it, was
thought to have about as much entertainment potential as the Bronze
Age. The story requires armies of boring fedora-wearing commuters to
disembark from Grand Central every morning. The characters wear dopey
clothes and drive boatlike cars, and everyone drinks and smokes too
much — even pregnant women.

After the 2008 presidential election,
the Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) Advisory Committee
and the Committee on Legislation (COL) held meetings with the ALA
Washington Office to discuss the key issues and concerns the library
community must communicate to the new Administration during this time
of transition and throughout Obama’s presidency.

Chances are, if you spend any time online you've come across Flickr.
Flickr is a wonderful site for storing, sharing and building community
around photographs. It's similar to online photo services like Kodak
Gallery or Shutterfly except with a greater social focus and tools and
features reminiscent of Facebook.

About a year ago Flickr launched the Flickr Commons,
a project dedicated to sharing and describing the public photo
collections of the world's leading cultural heritage institutions.
Starting this past January with The Library of Congress, and continuing
with places such as The Smithsonian Institution, The Brooklyn Museum,
The National Maritime Museum, The National Library of New Zealand, the
Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands and numerous others, the Commons
has grown steadily over the past year into a truly remarkable public
photography resource.

We are delighted to be the latest institution to join in this endeavor, with an initial contribution of 1,300 images culled from various areas of our diverse photographic collections.

New Year traditions that all Americans are familiar with include the ball drop in Times Square, the Tournament of Roses Parade, fireworks, year-end lists, New Year’s resolutions, a toast and/or a kiss at midnight, Auld Lang Syne, and predictions for the year ahead. Here are some other customs you might not be as familiar with....

I follow the Southern traditional one, black-eyed peas and ham, with some onion in it, too.. steamed greens on the side with vinegar.. sweet honey and butter cornbread.. iced tea :) ..Happy Holidays...

Maurizio Seracini stands facing Leonardo da Vinci's "Adoration of the Magi," which is being displayed on a massive bank of 70 flat-screen monitors. Seracini holds what looks like a plastic gun. He points it at the masterwork and begins moving his arm in a circular motion.

On the screens, the brownish veneer of the painting is brushed away, and da Vinci's original drawings of a fight scene come into view. "We just went through the paint," he says. "This is a drawing never seen for 500 years -- this the real work of Leonardo."

Social virtual worlds such as Second Life are digital representations of the real world where human-controlled avatars evolve and interact through social activities. Understanding the characteristics of existing virtual worlds can be extremely valuable to optimize their design. In this work we perform the first extensive analysis of Second Life. We have crawled around 13000 Regions over one month, and gathered information about objects, avatars, and server state. The analysis of our traces shows several surprising results. We find that 30% of the Regions are never visited during a six day period, whereas only few Regions have large peak populations. Moreover, the vast majority of Regions are static, i.e., objects are seldom created or destroyed. Interestingly, avatars interact similarly to humans in real life, gathering in small groups, visiting the same places and meeting the same avatars again, showing a highly predictable behavior. Based on these observations, we discuss several techniques to enhance Second Life or other similar social virtual worlds....Also found online via Goggle Scholar at http://www.thlab.net/tr/CR-PRL-2008-07-0002.pdf

Monday, December 15, 2008

The Housing Bubble and Foreclosure CrisisPosted on December 15, 2008 by pdurham000

CNN reports today
that as the subprime mortgage mess has unfolded, American home values
have declined by a total of more than $2 trillion dollars. And CBS’s 60 Minutes reported last night
that significantly larger numbers of other mortgage loans, known as
“Alt-As” and “option ARMs,” which attracted home buyers with low
initial interest rates, will soon reset at higher rates.

Investment fund manager Whitney Tilson, who was interviewed by Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes, thinks
we’ve only worked our way through about 50% of the housing bubble
as yet and that, over the next few years, resetting Alt-As and option
ARMS may bring a repeat of the subprime fiasco, with many more
Americans suffering the trauma of foreclosure. Let’s hope Mr. Tilson
is wrong.

Listen up, Barack Obama! You'll find useful reading on LJ's annual Best Books list, from Stephen Hess's What Do We Do Now? A Workbook for the President-Elect to Mahvish Rukhsana Khan's My Guantánamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me and Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape.
It's not all politics, though. From fiction debuts by Uwem Akpan, Nam
Le, and Saša Stanišic´ to works from masters Toni Morrison, Philip
Roth, and Marilynne Robinson, from a biography of Shakespeare's wife to
a chronicle of Sixties “girls like us,” and from accounts of divorce
and madness to hot thrillers and cool how-to, this list has enough to
occupy anyone for the coming year.

Nielsen has issued a year-end look at the most popular trends among Americans during 2008, covering everything from the top TV programs to the most popular consumer packaged goods.

FOX’s “American Idol” was the top TV program of 2008, according to Nielsen. Tuesday night broadcasts of “American Idol,” through December 7, drew 15.5% of U.S. TV households, on average, while Wednesday night “American Idol” broadcasts drew an average of 15.3% of all TV households.

Viewers with DVR access gave NBC’s “Heroes” the biggest bump any primetime program received in 2008. The average TV audience for “Heroes” increased by 35% when timeshifted viewing within seven days of a program’s original air date was factored into Nielsen’s ratings. FOX’s “Fringe” and ABC’s “Lost” also drew large audience boosts — +26% and +25%, respectively — from DVR viewers.
The 2008 Superbowl, which drew 43.1% of all U.S. TV households, was the most popular single telecast of 2008.

As we've noted before, "Lost" benefits from my TiVo and saving to watch at timeshifted time, and repeated viewings...

In January, the Library embarked on something that took the online community by storm. In conjunction with Flickr, we loaded a few thousand
images from the Library of Congress’ vast collections and asked the
user community to get involved: Give us your tags, your comments, your
huddled masses …

We were essentially conducting an experiment to see how
crowdsourcing might enhance the quality of the information we are able
to provide about our collections, while also finding innovative ways to
get those collections out to people who might have an avid interest in
them.

As we’ve said again and again, we’ve been bowled over by the response. Now, the Library has released its report on the Flickr pilot. (The full report is here; a summary is here. Both links are PDFs.)

After the jump is an account of some of our findings, as adapted
from a piece intended for the Library of Congress Gazette, our in-house
newsletter.

As a young news researcher at The Washington Post, Elisabeth Lacey ''Liz'' Donovan helped Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein cover the Watergate scandal -- and take down a president.

As a veteran at The Miami Herald, Donovan helped lead the transition to computer-based research. A pioneering Internet user -- yet eternal flower child -- she enabled Herald writers to produce work that won Pulitzer Prizes.

Said humorist Dave Barry: 'I went to her with many strange requests, and they never fazed her. I'd ask her something like, `Are there any politicians whose last name is Doody?' And she'd say, `Do you want federal, state or both?'''...

The word "magazine" is derived from the Arabic word "makhazin," meaning storehouse. Since Daniel Defoe published the world's first English magazine back in 1704, millions of magazines catering to nearly every imaginable taste have been created and consumed, passed from person to person in cafes, barber shops, libraries, and homes around the world. If you're wondering what cars people drove in the eighties or what was in fashion thirty years ago, there's a good chance that you'll find that answer in a magazine. Yet few magazine archives are currently available online.

Today, we're announcing an initiative to help bring more magazine
archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to
begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony. Are you a baseball history fanatic? Try a search for [hank aaron pursuing babe ruth's record] on Google Book Search. You'll find a link to a 1973 Ebony article
about Hank Aaron, written as he closed in on Babe Ruth's original
record for career home runs. You can read the article in full color and
in its original context, just as you would in the printed magazine.
Scroll back a few pages, for example, and you'll find a two-page spread
on 1973's fall fashions. If you'd like to read further, you can click on "Browse all issues" to view issues from across the decades....

See also the article at SearchEngineLand.. inset above is one of my screenshot images from today, showing how the search feature in Google Books, set for magazines, searches even the ads and advertising content of the magazines...